Gender can be relevant, because at many full time universities the students live there and much of the social life is there. A good example was Caltech in 70s a

Gender can be relevant, because at many full time universities the students live there and much of the social life is there. A good example was Caltech in 70s and 80s. When I was started there in the late '70s it was around 85%/15% male/female. Caltech is a hard school. There isn't a lot of time left over to develop much of a social life outside of campus. Whatever social life you had was going to be mostly on campus. On campus that 85/15 ratio made any kind of normal social life for the majority of the heterosexual male students very unlikely, leading to a lot of unhappy males. It was no picnic for the women either--they sometimes got overwhelmed at the amount of male attention almost constantly on them. In that kind of environment academics are affected. I knew a lot of people who definitely would have done better in class if they had been at a school that was just like Caltech except with a more balanced gender ratio. Caltech put a lot of effort in to boost the female percentage. They didn't give women any admissions preference or lower admission standards for women, but they did try to find high school girls who were qualified and convince them to apply to Caltech. Nowadays they are something like almost 60/40.